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No.  Never.   Thanks for coming out.  
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Feb 17, 2023 18:59
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| # ¿ May 14, 2024 19:28 |
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Alright, let's talk about it. The last time we had a Fedorthread it was created by a lunatic and lasted 122 pages across three and a half years. Now, mercifully, the story is over, and it is time for all of us to write its conclusion. Fedor Emelianenko is the most famous, most prominent mixed martial artist to never compete in the UFC. He spent the first decade of his career virtually undefeated, with the "virtually" coming courtesy of a cut stoppage after an elbow, which was technically illegal, but it was Rings, it was a tournament, and his opponent was Japanese hero Tsuyoshi Kohsaka, so they rolled with it. He won Pride's heavyweight championship in 2003 by battering the consensus #1 in Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira and remained Pride's undefeated heavyweight champion until its death in 2007. He beat Nogueira again in a rematch, he beat former champion Mark Coleman twice, he beat Mirko Cro-Cop in one of the biggest fights in Japanese MMA history, and after Pride folded, he beat UFC champions Tim Sylvia and Andrei Arlovski in one round apiece before finally succumbing to age and losing. His mixture of skill and speed was unmatched at heavyweight in his prime and it's a testament to his skills that he was the top of the world even undersized and was still beating ranked heavyweights at 45. He's the best there ever was.  Fedor Emelianenko is the most overrated mixed martial artist in the sport. His path to the championship was paved over middleweights, aging veterans and guys like Semmy Schilt that other fighters had already defeated in more impressive fashion. He may have held the Pride title for half a decade, but in twelve subsequent fights in the company he only actually defended it four times. Moreover, he ducked multiple top contenders in the process, never fighting top Pride star Josh Barnett, former training partner turned rival Sergei Kharitonov or even top middleweight Shogun Rua. He turned down a rematch against Cro-Cop and refused to fight Bob Sapp, he had to repeatedly hold the ropes to beat Matt Lindland, he was getting touched up by Andrei Arlovski and Brett "Worse than The Manic Hispanic Eddie Sanchez" Rogers before they walked facefirst into big right hands, and after getting knocked out by UFC washout Fábio Maldonado to the point that the Russian commentator was screaming for the fight to be stopped, he somehow still won a decision from the Russian MMA federation of which he was President. He's the sport's biggest non-Irish hype job, his fall was the product of his own hubris, and it's good he's gone.  Fedor Emelianenko is one of the most profoundly irritating social phenomenons mixed martial arts has ever seen. What should have been a slam dunk of a legacy--an extremely talented fighter who was telling the UFC to go gently caress itself before it was cool--is instead a huge loving quagmire of bullshit. On one end of the spectrum you have the internet being absolutely insufferable about him for years, with endless memes about Fedor's cyborg brain or his stupid loving sweaters all wrapped around the insistence that he's better than everyone and would have easily beaten every UFC champion of the 21st century. On the other, you have the actual bad poo poo, like his professional relationship with neo-nazi fighter Roman Zentsov, or the time he and his manager intimated that he beat Arlovski because Arlovski had "Slavic heart and a Slavic soul," or his instrumental role as part of Vladimir Putin's self-propagandizing about being an icon of badass masculinity. His fans would defend him by pointing out that it was only the people around him doing those things while ignoring that Fedor continued to surround himself with those people. His management were racists, his brother was a rapist, and he was lending his voice to Russian propaganda as recently as last year.  Fedor Emelianenko could have been the best fighter of all time. Instead he got squashed by Ryan Bader twice. I'm deeply glad I got to see his entire career unfold, I loved watching him fight once upon a time, and his downfall was so gratifyingly perfect that I could not have asked for anything more save, maybe, getting submitted by Frank Mir. I understand our fanbase's love for him but watching the internet fall all over itself one last time to worship him was embarrassing and I'm glad he's gone. Please do not come back. Share your Fedor thoughts so we, together, can write the final word on his legacy.
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Feb 17, 2023 19:00
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Bluedeanie posted:Fedor was a top 10 heavyweight in the world in his prime. He was maybe even a top 5 heavyweight. I am highly doubtful he was ever the best in the world in the early 2000s and anyone who thinks he is the greatest of all time belongs in some sort of longterm mental health care facility after getting their rear end beat by Batman and/or Robin, or perhaps Batgirl depending on circumstances. I'm with you on the rest, but I do think, in fairness, there's an argument to be made for Fedor being the best heavyweight of the 2000s. If you're taking the MMA world from 2000-2009, your top heavyweight options are, like,
So in terms of "could Barnett/Sergei/a less silly Andrei have beaten Fedor" the answer is obviously yes, but in terms of actual accomplishments, I do think it's hard to beat Fedor for that period of heavyweight.
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Feb 18, 2023 00:01
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The Carwin fight is, weirdly, the most legitimizing of Brock's career. For all the memes about Brock being unable to take a punch, a top ballot candidate for hardest heavyweight hitter ever in Carwin (it's him, Ngannou, Lewis and Hunt), who'd laid out every person he'd so much as touched, hit him in the head 39 times and somehow didn't put him out. Also I personally think Fedor would've smoked contract dispute-era Randy. Randy still got his poo poo broke by Gabriel Gonzaga before he won, he got dropped by the advanced standup techniques of Brock Lesnar and he couldn't handle Nogueira's boxing OR his bottom game. I think he was the beneficiary of an extremely fortunate moment in the UFC's divisional timing.
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Feb 19, 2023 19:20
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